Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Disinformation at Dealey Plaza

Disinformation at Dealey Plaza

In his recent article - A Cruel and Shocking Misinterpretation - [http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2015/05/dan-hardway-on-shenon.html / http://aarclibrary.org/a-cruel-and-shocking-misinterpretation/ ] House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Dan Hardway uses the word “disinformation” to describe what they were questioning CIA officer David Atlee Phillips about when Hardway says- “Initially, the CIA was cooperating....(it was) when we started pushing on investigating the disinformation efforts after the assassination, and realizing that I could tie just about every single disinformation effort directly back to David Attle Phillips that George Joannides got involved.”

Disinformation is defined as "false or misleading information that is put out by a government or an intelligence agency to influence public opinion" – so if it doesn't stem from a national government intelligence agency then it isn't disinformation.

The specific disinformation efforts Hardway is referring to are the failed attempts to blame what happened at Dealey Plaza on Castro Cuban Communists – dozens of easily charted case studies that are of a very specific type of disinformation known as “Black propaganda,”- a type specifically defined by the CIA's Paul Linebarger, the former US Army officer and author of the standard textbook "Propaganda."

Any study of psychological warfare and disinformation would have to include the work of Paul Linebarger, a professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University, who also taught the black arts of propaganda and psychological warfare operations to CIA agents, and among his best students were E. Howard Hunt, Ed Lansdale and David Atlee Phillips.

According to Linebarger, “Psychological warfare consists of the application of parts of the science called psychology to the conduct of war; psychological warfare comprises the use of propaganda against the enemy, together with such military operational measures as may supplement the propaganda. Propaganda may be described in turn, as organized persuasion by non-violent means. War itself may be considered to be, among other things, a violent form of persuasion. War is waged against the minds, not the bodies of the enemy.”

“Specifically defined,” says Linebarger, “propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of public or mass produced communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific public purpose, whether military, economic or political. Military propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communications designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given enemy, neutral or friendly foreign group for a specific strategic or tactical purpose.”

Linebarger warned his students not to use such techniques against Americans. “I hate to think what would ever happen,” he once said with a prophet’s voice, “if any of you ever got out of this business and got involved in U.S. politics. These kinds of dirty tricks must never be used in internal U.S. politics. The whole system would come apart.” Well, they were used and are being used today, and the whole system did come apart.

Note that if the communication is not planned, it cannot be called propaganda, and if it does not originate from an intelligence agent, agency, service or network, it is not disinformation, as it is classically defined: Deliberately misleading information announced publicly or leaked by a government or especially by an intelligence agency in order to influence public opinion or the government in another nation.
Some of the information that real disinformation agents dish out is classified as “black.”

According to Ladislas Farago such, “Black Propaganda is a fundamental intelligence operation,…because it never identifies its real source and pretends to originate within or close to the enemy.”

Not one or two but over two dozen examples can be given – the most recent by Phil Sheon in his book “A Cruel and Shocking Act.”

These are the “fingerprints of intelligence” that Sen. Richard Schweiker (R. Pa.) referred to in describing what he learned about the assassination of President Kennedy while serving on the Church Intelligence Committee, the records of which are still sealed to this day.

Two new and important books by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics III) and John Newman's “Where Angels Tread Lightly” refer specifically to the black propaganda efforts to blame the assassination on Castro.

Peter Dale Scott:

“In the days after the murders in Dallas, the U.S. Was flooded with dubious stories, most of them swiftly discredited, linking Oswald to either a Cuban or Soviet conspiracy. Those which most preoccupied the FBI and CIA all came out of Mexico. These stories exhibited certain common characteristics. - They all came from either directly from an intelligence source, or from someone in the hands of an intelligence agency - The Stories changed over time, to support either a pro-conspiratorial hypothesis (“Phase One”) or a rebuttal of this (“Phase Two”).- The Warren Commission was led to believe that the“Phase One”stories were without basis. In fact a number of unresolved anomalies suggest that behind them was some deeper truth, still not revealed.- In retrospect, these stories should not have been taken seriously. In fact the CIA was able to rely on them, not as a source of truth, but as a source of coercive influence over the rest of the government. It will help us to understand what was going on if we refer to the stories, not as 'information' or even as 'allegations,' but as MANAGED STORIES. To say this leaves open the question of who were the ultimate managers?”

Scott: “I do wish to argue that these managed stories, fleeting and insubstantial though they are, were of central importance in determining the outcome of the Kennedy assassination investigation. In succeeding years, furthermore, the discredited 'Phase-One' stories have been revived to manipulate public opinion, even after the CIA and FBI had agreed on a 'Phase-Two' interpretation of Oswald's movements in Mexico City. In 2013, for example, the discredited Garro story of the twist party was revived in a mainstream book by Philip Shenon.”

Newman: “The plot to assassinate President Kennedy was designed to deceive both people in the government and the public at large. A convincing trail of evidence was established to make it appear that the Kennedy brothers’ plan to overthrow Castro had been turned around and used against them by Fidel himself, resulting in the assassination of President Kennedy."

“There is an unstated corollary principal in the game of deception that Allen Dulles was kind enough to give us. Once a “single piece” of a black operation has been compromised, the entire fabric of that operation can potentially unravel.”

You can't understand what happened at Dealey Plaza unless you understand the fundamentals of psychological warfare, disinformation and black propaganda – because that's the part of the Dealey Plaza operational plan that failed, that failed in its contention that Castro Cuban Communists were responsible for the assassination, and because it failed it gives us a good glimpse into the Looking Glass and brings us very close to those who designed the plan, especially the part that failed.

Allen Dulles brought a book with him to the first meeting of the Warren Commission, Donovan's American Assassins, in which the author of PT109 designates most American assassins as looney loners. Instead, he should have shared his own book, "The Crafts of Intelligence," in which he recommends Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," in which the five types of secret agents - Native, Inside, Doubled, Expendable and Living Agents. When all of these agents are work together it is called the "Divine Skein," with a skein being a closely knit net and the Divine Skein a network of spies and the "treasure of the sovereign."

Those who were especially selected by the CIA were trained in psychological warfare by Linebarger, who besides using his own text "Propaganda," also used as a text book David Maurer's "The Big Con," the book that the movie "The Sting" was based on.

Linebarger notes that "security is designed to keep useful information from reaching the enemy, while propaganda operations are designed to get information to him. The term propaganda stems from the name of the department of the Vatican which had the duty of propagating the faith. And Black Propaganda must clearly be labeled as an act of the enemy"

In his book on propaganda Linebarger says that such disinformation, by its very nature, can be identified as such and traced back to its source, using his formula for doing so. Therefore, the real disinformation and propaganda on the assassination can be traced back to its source, which should be very close to those who were actually responsible for the assassination.

Linebarger developed the STASM formula for spot analysis, in which propaganda can be distinguished by the consideration of five elements:

1. Source
2. Time
3. Audience
4. Subject
5. Mission.

According to Linebarger, “This formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to note is the character of the source — the true source (who really got it out?), the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also the first use source (who used it the first time?) and the second source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high magnitude.”

It is apparent that the roots to many of the black propaganda operations related to Dealey Plaza, especially those that try to falsely implicate Castro in the assassination, stem back to David Atlee Phillips, another one of Linebarger’s protégés.

At the time of the assassination, David Phillips was working for the CIA in Mexico City, responsible for monitoring the Cuban and Russian embassies there, as well as keeping tabs on the activities of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) “in the hemisphere.” In August, 1963, the New Orleans representative of the FPCC, Lee Harvey Oswald, was seen with Phillips, aka “Maurice Bishop,” in the lobby of a Dallas office building, and shortly thereafter Oswald went on his mission to Mexico City.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Phillips interrogated a Nicaraguan intelligence agent who said that he had seen Oswald with Cuban Communists in Mexico City, and though Phillips knew this information was wrong, he promoted it within CIA as plausibly possible, and tried to get other Cubans to confirm Oswald’s false Communist associations.

One of these is from conversations which David Phillips had with Kevin Walsh, a former HSCA staffer who went on to work as a private detective in Washington, DC In a conversation not long before his death, Phillips remarked: "My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers." - David Atlee Phillips, July 1986.

I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald. After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba. I helped him when he came to Mexico City to obtain a visa, and when he returned to Dallas to wait for it I saw him twice there. We rehearsed the plan many times: In Havana Oswald was to assassinate Castro with a sniper's rifle from the upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep. Whether Oswald was a double-agent or a psycho I'm not sure, and I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the President's assassination but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.”

So the precise plan they had devised against Castro was “to assassinate Castro with a sniper’s rifle from the upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep.”

Among these plans we have records of Pathfinder, which we learned from the NPIC staff at JMWAVE where the Patherfinder records were intentionally misfiled, and the so-called Hemingway plot, in which Castro was known to visit Hemingway’s house in Cuba, providing an opportunity to shoot him.

Both cases were probably part of the attempt to adapt the Valkyrie plan for the German military to eliminate Hitler and take over Nazi Germany in July 1944, a plot that used a bomb but failed.

The aspect of the Valkyrie plan that was used at Dealey Plaza was the psychwar disinformation ploy to blame the murder of Hitler on the SS and Gestapo, while the plan adapted for use at Dealey Plaza framed Oswald as the designated patsy and attempted to blame the Dealey Plaza ambush on Castro Cuban Communists.